SpeakerS' biography

Dr. Matthew I. Banks received his BSE and MSE from Johns Hopkins University and Doctorate of Neuroscience from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Banks is currently Professor of Anesthesiology and Affiliate Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison, WI. Dr. Banks’ research interests include mechanisms of loss and recovery of consciousness under anesthesia, the overlap of these mechanisms with changes in arousal during natural sleep, the link between inflammation and brain function during delirium, and the mechanisms whereby psychedelics ameliorate psychiatric disorders.

Hal Blumenfeld is a neuroscientist and neurologist at Yale School of Medicine. He studies subcortical and cortical mechanisms of normal consciousness, impaired consciousness in epilepsy, and restoring consciousness with neurostimulation. His lab recently found that normal conscious perception of visual stimuli involves large-scale cortical and subcortical networks independent of task report and eye movements. The same networks are affected by transient disorders of consciousness such as temporal lobe seizures, where network inhibition of subcortical arousal plays a key role. These concepts have led to a clinical trial, stimulating the intralaminar thalamus to restore arousal and consciousness in temporal lobe seizures.

Marisa Carrasco (Julius Silver Professor of Psychology and Neural Science, Collegiate Professor, New York University) uses psychophysics, neuroimaging and neurostimulation to investigate  how attention shapes visual perception and alters appearance. She has chaired the NYU Psychology Department, served as senior editor of Vision Research and Journal of Vision, and been president of the Vision Sciences Society and the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. Her awards include NSF Young Investigator, AAUW, Guggenheim, Cattell, Vision Sciences Society’s Davida Teller, and CMU Carnegie Prize in Mind and Brain Sciences. She is a fellow of the American Psychological Society and the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Michael Cohen is an Assistant Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at Amherst College and a Research Scientist at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at M.I.T. His research focuses on asking questions like: How much of the world are observers aware of at any given moment? What are the limits of human perception? Why is some information encoded and remembered while other information goes unnoticed and is forgotten? What neural processes are critical for conscious processing? To answer these questions, he uses a combination of psychophysics, virtual reality, neuroimaging, and computational modeling.

Hanna Damasio is Dana Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience, Psychology and Neurology, and Director, Cognitive Neuroimaging Center, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.  She has published over 280 scientific articles and is the author of the award-winning book Lesion Analysis in Neuropsychology, and of Human Brain Anatomy in Computerized Images, now in its second edition.  Recent publications on the topic of consciousness include “Homeostatic Feelings and the Biology of Consciousness”, BRAIN, Oxford Academic, Vol. 145; 2231-2235, 2022; “Feelings are the Source of Consciousness”, Neural Computation, Vol. 35:3, 2023; and “Consciousness begins with feeling, not thinking”, IAI News. /articles/consciousness-begins-with-feelings-hanna-damasio-auid-2462, May 2023.

TBA

Deisseroth is Professor of Bioengineering and Psychiatry at Stanford, and an HHMI Investigator. Deisseroth received his undergraduate degree from Harvard in 1992, his PhD from Stanford in 1998, and his MD from Stanford in 2000. Deisseroth then completed his medical internship and psychiatry residency at Stanford, and is board-certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. He continues as a psychiatrist at Stanford specializing in affective and autism-spectrum disorders, employing medications and neural stimulation. For developing optogenetics, and for discovering the structures and mechanisms of natural light-gated ion channels, Deisseroth has received the 2010 Nakasone Prize, 2012 Perl Prize, 2013 Lounsbery Prize, 2013 Gabbay Prize, 2013 BRAIN Prize, 2014 Dickson Prize in Science, 2014 Keio Prize, 2015 Breakthrough Prize, 2015 Lurie Prize, 2015 Albany Prize, 2015 Dickson Prize in Medicine, 2016 BBVA Award, 2017 Massry Prize, 2017 Fresenius Prize, 2018 Gairdner Award, 2018 Kyoto Prize, 2020 Heineken Prize, 2021 Lasker Award, 2022 Horwitz Prize, and 2023 Japan Prize. Deisseroth was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2010, National Academy of Sciences in 2012, and National Academy of Engineering in 2019.

Itzhak Fried, MD, PhD. is Professor of Neurosurgery at the University of California, Los Angeles and at Tel-Aviv University. He is the Director of the Epilepsy Surgery Program and member of the Brain Research Institute at UCLA. He is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and member of the Israeli Academy of Science. Dr. Fried’s research centers on the basic mechanisms and neuromodulation of brain networks using single neuron recordings and stimulation in humans. This provides a unique opportunity to study at the single neuron level the content of consciousness and its emergence in subjects who can declare their memories and wishes.

Patrick Haggard leads the Action and Body research group at Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London.  He has researched voluntary action, conscious intention and sense of agency for over 25 years.  He has developed new methods for studying the sense of agency, and applied these in experimental studies with volunteers and different groups of neuropsychiatric patients.  He has also worked extensively on the neural and conscious precursors of voluntary action, and on the phenomenology of conscious intention.

L. Syd M Johnson, PhD is a philosopher/bioethicist/neuroethicist at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at SUNY Upstate Medical University, and an ethics consultant at Upstate’s hospitals. She’s an Associate Editor for Neuroethics, and a member of the NIH BRAIN Initiative Neuroethics Working Group. Dr. Johnson’s books include The Ethics of Uncertainty: Entangled Ethical and Epistemic Risks in Disorders of Consciousness and Neuroethics and Nonhuman Animals. Her research focuses on animal ethics, research ethics, and brain injuries, including brain death and disorders of consciousness. Her interest in all things with brains includes every kind of critter, zombies, and robots.

Gabriel Kreiman is a Professor at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School and Associate Director of the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines. His lab combines computational models, neurophysiological recordings, and behavioral experiments to decipher the mechanisms orchestrating cognition. The Kreiman lab has contributed to our understanding of vision, memory and the development of biologically-inspired artificial intelligence algorithms.

Marcello Massimini, was trained as a Medical Doctor, received a PhD in Neurophysiology and is currently Professor of Physiology at the University of Milan and fellow of the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research. Spanning from in vivo intracellular recordings to neuroimaging, EEG and TMS-EEG in humans, his whole research activity has been devoted to understanding the consequences of brain injury and what changes in cortical circuits when consciousness fades and recovers. On these subjects he has published papers in high impact journals (Science, Nature Neuroscience, PNAS, Neuron, Brain) and a book (“Sizing up Consciousness”) for Oxford University Press.

Eric Karl Oermann is an Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery, Radiology, and Data Science at NYU. He studied mathematics at Georgetown and philosophy with the President’s Council on Bioethics and abandoned graduate studies in group theory to pursue Neurosurgery. Dr. Oermann completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Verily Life Sciences, and served as an advisor at Google-X on Project Amber. He has published over one-hundred manuscripts spanning machine learning, neurosurgery, and philosophy in journals ranging from The American Journal of Bioethics to Nature. He was one of Forbes Magazine’s 30-Under-30, and has co-founded three startups.

Josef Parvizi, MD, Ph.D., is a professor of Neurology and Neurological Sciences and practices as a physician-scientist treating patients with epilepsy and leading the Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at Stanford University. He has been at Stanford for about 16 years, specializing in a multi-modal approach, combining direct recordings from the surface and depth of the human brain with direct electrical stimulation of the brain. Parvizi’s contribution to the field of consciousness can be summarized in "Subjectivity" and "Causality." Detailed subjective reports are combined with rigorous intracranial recordings, cross-subject anatomical validations, and large-scale brain-wide mappings with imaging and electrophysiological means.  The combination of subjectivity and causality coming from Parvizi’s lab provides a unique and refreshing opportunity in studies of human consciousness.

Professor of Psychology and Psychology, U. Wisconsin–Madison. Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. Empirical contributions to consciousness research stem primarily from work on prioritization in human working memory, which has included "activity-silent" working memory and transformations of representational geometries. (Also oversaw Jason Samaha's dissertation research on the role of oscillatory dynamics in perceptual awareness.) Scholarly/pedagogical contributions stem from the experience of working with patient H.M. while training in the laboratory of Suzanne Corkin.

Philippe Rochat was trained in Piaget’s school, currently Professor of Psychology at Emory University and Director of the Emory Infant and Child Laboratory. An invited professor at various universities in France, Brazil and Denmark, he is a 2006–2007 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2014–2015 Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Paris, France. Aside from many empirical papers on the early development of self-awareness, social cognition and morality in children across cultures, he published 5 books, most recently Moral Acrobatics: How we avoid ethical ambiguity by thinking in black and white (2021, Oxford U Press) and Finitude: The psychology of self and time (2022, Routledge).

Daniel L. Schacter is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. Schacter’s early research explored the distinction between explicit (i.e., conscious) and implicit (i.e., nonconscious) forms of memory, and more recently has examined the nature of memory distortions and how individuals use memory to imagine future and other hypothetical events, resulting in over 400 peer-reviewed publications. Schacter has also authored several books, including Searching for Memory and The Sevens Sins of Memory. He has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and received various awards, including most recently the Distinguished Career Contributions Award from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society.

David received his PhD in Experimental Psychology (2004) from the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain. He then moved to the UK to work at the Behavioural Brain Sciences Center at the University of Birmingham. In 2008, he set up his laboratory at Imperial College London where he was an Associate Professor until 2016 when he returned to Spain. David’s work has focused on understanding the distinction between conscious and non-conscious processes during perceptual selection, learning and memory, and metacognition, using a wide range of behavioural, neuroimaging and computational methods.